Social Decision Making

Many decisions lead to consequences for others. Our laboratory explores several sorts of social decisions: those that involve
personal sacrifice for another’s benefit (i.e., other-regarding or altruistic decisions), those in which individuals obtain socially
relevant rewards (e.g., images of attractive faces), and those that involve interactions between two or more individuals
(e.g., choices in a competitive game). We adopt the working hypothesis that, throughout evolutionary time, many of the most critical
decisions were social, not economic. Thus, neural systems for the adaptive control of behavior often acted to achieve social goals, in concert
with systems for understanding the cognitions and desires of others. We believe that this is an important and understudied area of
research – one that will merge with neuroeconomics over the coming years.